Coaldust: Performance in MMORPGs

Coaldust is a tactical intervention in the world of massive
multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). More specifically:
Coaldust is performed in the world of LOTRO, a game based on the J. R. R. Tolkein novels and the recent movies.

The first Coaldust performance was on the topic of the Sago Mine Disaster that occurred on June 2, 2006 in Sago, WV.

The second Coaldust performance deals with 1) the April 2010
explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine at Montcoal in West
Virginia, and 2) with the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest
organized armed uprising in US labor history.

Think of the pixie dust that enables Tinker Bell to fly in Disney’s
Peter Pan or of the quest for magical sparkling dust in World of
Warcraft or of the quest for magic “shire dust” in LOTRO. Dust is the raw material of fantasy worlds, of never-never land.

Coal dust is rather different: suspended in the air around coal
mining areas, it coats the lungs and leads to deadly pneumoconiosis.
Coal accounts for 50% of the power generated in the USA and 90% in the state of West Virginia. Coal dust is everywhere. It seeps into the skin and tattoos the body.

We will turn the pixie dust of online fantasy gaming into the coal
dust of the real. We will liberate the imaginary of play from its
narrative capture by literary fantasy.
Why LOTRO? Lord of the Rings is the epic high
fantasy. It is a concrete imaginary repertoire familiar from movies and
other visual displays. It is also a literal landscape, tied to the
practices of narrativity and the literary imaginary. For us, the epic
high fantasy is the disappearance of work, of real conditions. Think of
the meeting of these two landscapes: West Virginia and the Middle Earth.
Think of Tolkein’s Mines of Moria, familiar from the movies and the
novel: empty, crafted by dwarves, vast underground cities… Now compare
these mines to the very real mines of Upshur County, WV. Think of Lord
of the Rings as a collective fantasy, as a way of imagining conditions
of work: as heroic, as tied to essence or race, as magical… Fantasy is
explicitly a repudiation and turning away from science and technology.
Fantasy reduces the real to axis of good/evil. The novels are one plane
of the fantasy; the game is another plane; to play the game is to
inhabit but also to work through this fantasy.

We will make gameplay a waking state, an emergence from the fantasy.
How can in-game performance speak of the outside of this fantasy? What
of the relation of player and avatar? We refuse to simply accept that
the avatar or game character is an extension of the self that “drives”
or “operates” the avatar. Reverse this: avatar and subject are both
extensions as subjects of empire and its history.

The notion of “game-play” as a term for the interactions and
dynamics of playing a game rests on the distinction of play-work that
underlies our cultural understanding of games. As we focus on games as
objects of cultural interest and even “real economic” interest, this
work-play distinction breaks down. The game-play must be understood as
labor, but what kind of labor? In what way, i.e. what kind of labor? A LOTRO
player at work (play?) for hours, or even for the entire day as in the
case of a “Chinese gold farmer,” certainly commits his/her body to the
game. Body here includes cognitive labor, the physical investment of the
hands, the posture, internal affect (it hurts when your avatar is
killed [somewhere? where does it hurt?]). In fact, the extreme or
dramatic cases of the gold farm laborers aren’t necessary here: this
level of physical commitment is the case for any fan. The gaming addict
who plays for hours on end sublimates the body to the game. No,
sublimation isn’t sufficient either, since it implies a making invisible
or reduction of the role of the body, whereas anyone watching gamers
sees many modes of bodily investment, from fingers twitches to
involuntary curses, and so on. While it is important to materialize the
labor of the game in the player’s body, it is necessary to emphasize the
immaterial and networked quality of the labor, i.e. an avatar mining
coal, eventually to be sold for gold, is an image in a network of
exchanges from the gamer’s body, to in-game exchanges, to EBay sales, to
account information, to actual resources (i.e. amount of server space
or energy consumed by running the account), to cultural production
around the game (e.g. machinima, or this project itself!), and so on.

Let’s interrogate “game-play” from another direction. “Play” invokes
literary and theatrical performance. A play frames and controls the
borders of performance through genre. When we use the term game-play we
coin a new portmanteau of theatrical play in game space that asks after
and test the extents of performative effects, and thus the extents of
chained sign-regimes.

At one level, our performance is an event that emerges from within
the narrativity of the game world. At another level, the performance is a
tactical intervention that takes the diegesis of fantasy and
historicizes it, producing not just play but display
that fissures fantasy and moves the viewer. (“Tactical interventions”
create territorial autonomous zone [TAZs] in codified spaces.) We
intervene in the narrative and imaginary repertoire of the gameworld.
Game narratives draw us in by persuasive parallels to the narratives of
our own lives, experiences, and imaginations. We still understand even
the most abstract game (Tetris, for example) through human endeavor and
achievement, through points and levels. The perceptual – largely visual –
achievement of the game interface is a sense of immersion in a “world”
that is persuasively real even when clearly fantastic. Even radically
fantastic game settings necessarily involve some projection of the self
into the world. The very use of the term “world” in gaming signifies
this immersion. In phenomenological terms, we live in the world in terms
of a horizon of understanding and possibilities; so too we project
ourselves into a gaming world through the discovery and engagement with
just such a horizon. The discovery done in gaming is similar to that
done as a child learns to explore the world around it. Slowly the
society and politics of the real world become known to a child just as
these things would become learned by a gamer submerged into a “game
world.” In some cases we find that the game world parodies the real
world, but in other cases the discovery within the game world opens the
doors to similar, but different, human-like societies. Within any of
these gaming societies, though, mirrors of real world devices can be
found. For example, the economic drive in a lot of larger games tends to
be mining, which is one of the largest economic gains in West Virginia.

Why mining? Gold is a fundamental element of the fantasy; coal is
too, but we might say that the conversion of coal into gold already
starts to break apart the fantasy, since it requires thinking about
extraction and transformation. LOTRO, like
other fantasy MMORPGs, builds its economy on mining. Various types of
ore lie near the surface of the game world. Character avatars can easily
mine the ore and sell it within the world for goods. These goods do not
“lie about” the way ore does, but must be made or fought for. As a
result, mined ore,
along with some other staple objects such as wood, is the basis of the
economy. This fact is further reinforced by the in-game monetary
exchange based on gold, silver, and copper. In the virtual worlds of
online MMORPGs, mining is the baseline means of production and drives
the economy of the game world. The common currency of gold and other
coinage is derived within the game from extraction and subsequent
smelting and minting. All goods and services within the world are
exchangeable on a scale pegged to gold, but ultimately propped up by
extraction of ore. Mining ore can be sold directly, traded, horded,
stolen, and otherwise distributed as a zero-degree game-world object.
The geophysics of extraction in a world such as LOTROis fundamentally
magical, that is, ore is discovered simply sitting on the surface of the
world and a character merely requires a tool and some experience in
order to mine it. (You don’t even need a cart: once mined, the ore
simply goes into one of the character’s many invisible backpacks.)
Depending on the virtual world, there maybe a logic to the distribution
of the ore, i.e. certain elements appear in certain regions; but there
is no sense of other rocks or materials ores. In short, there are two
types of “land”: generic landscape that characters can walk on or climb
but which has no material depth; and minable ore that sits on top of
this landscape. In a sense, the ore is a magical extrusion of the
landscape. It may then function as a signifier of the background physics
of the game world: it manifest the solid but ever-productive codes of
engines that drive the characters and weapons and other gameplay
objects. Furthermore, there is a magical regeneration of ore: after a
character mines a site of ore, the ore will “re-spawn” after a certain
time elapses.

In the state of West Virginia and through the Appalachian region,
coal continues to dominate the economy, culture, and history, even as
the industry fades and recedes. West Virginia is riddled with mines, its
hills flattened from the practice of Mountaintop Removal, its history
blanketed with coal wars, families and communities locked in the mine’s
embrace. This leads to intensely contradictory conditions in West
Virginia. The land continues to be ravaged with as yet little effort
made plan long-term recovery. And yet, groups such as Friends of Coal
insist on the centrality of coal to persist in the state’s future: “The
Friends of Coal is dedicated to inform and educate West Virginia
citizens about the coal industry and its vital role in the state’s
future. Our goal is to provide a united voice for an industry that has
been and remains a critical economic contributor to West Virginia. By
working together, we can provide good jobs and benefits for future
generations, which will keep our children and grandchildren close to
home.”
Held within the fantasy are uneven resources and exploitative labor
practices under global capitalism. MMORPGs are not merely worlds of
narrative and imaginary repertoires, but are flows of virtual
merchandise from within the game to other markets, such as Ebay or other
online traders. The famous “gold farmer” scenario involves underpaid
third world gamers repetitively mining gold and other minerals in
MMORPGs. We will set (pose) coal extraction and the production of
virtuality in juxtaposition as productive resources. We will construct a
multi-dimensional performance, a work not located in the online
computer game nor in the documentation of the performance (nor
elsewhere) but in the ongoing work on the game and its space of
occurrence.

We are bound to fail. (As one of us boldly puts it: “We are bound to
fail in the liberation of the whole but we will succeed in the
education of the few.”) Failure because of the passing, ephemerality of
the performance. (The game continues.) Failure because of the rigid
codification of desire and identification with narrative and image in
the MMORPG. (What is our performance against
the quests of warriors, magicians, hobbits, elves…?) Nothing more than
dust in the air of the fantasy world. Our intervention is not “art,” at
least not in so far as “artifice” remains within the fantasy and remains
part of the diegetic unfolding of the game. Art as part of the game
contributes to the game. The intervention breaks the fantasy. Of course,
it does so only to gesture to another imaginary and another fantasy
space: precisely to the vertiginous re-siting of the subject in the
world of energy production and the extraction industry. We admit that
this remains a gesture only, remains a performance, but a gesture that
shifts fantasy towards utopia.

In the first case, narrativity is in the service of another domain,
whereas the latter is necessarily and problematically tethered to real
conditions. The potential of utopia is its failure and constant referral
to the real that resists presentation.

The work is not the collapse of the real and the virtual, nor the
separation of the real and the virtual, but their orbital and
intermedial communication in a multi-dimensional performance work. Call
this: (juxt)(a)Posing worlds.